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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 621. Cornelius
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Literature
Brooke, S. A., Sermons, 2. (1875) 36.
Clark, F. E., in Sermons by the Monday Club, 17th Ser. (1891), 326.
Dykes, J. O., From Jerusalem to Antioch (1875), 347.
Fairweather, D., Bound in the Spirit (1906), 180.
Horton, R. F., Lyndhurst Road Pulpit (1893), 257.
Lewis, Z. H., Petros, 245, 255.
Luckock, H. M., Footprints of the Apostles as traced by Saint Luke in the Acts, ii. (1905) 1.
Maclaren, A., The Acts of the Apostles (Bible Class Expositions) (1894), 129.
Maclaren, A., Expositions: The Acts of the Apostles i.-xii. (1907), 295.
Matheson, G., The Representative Men of the New Testament (1905), 296.
Milligan, G., in Men of the New Testament: Matthew to Timothy (1905), 277.
Noble, F. A., Typical New Testament Conversions (1901), 210.
Stokes, G. T., The Acts of the Apostles (Expositor's Bible), ii. (1892) 92.
Wakinshaw, W., John's Ideal City (1915), 159.
Williams, J. P., The Duty of Exercise, 72.
Dictionary of the Apostolic Church, i. (1915) 259 (W. F. Boyd).
Dictionary of the Bible, i. (1898) 499 (A. Grieve).
Cornelius will always be of special interest to us as almost the first, if not actually the first, Gentile convert admitted into the Church of Christ.
The Church was at first in appearance only a Jewish sect; but the great stride is now taken which carries it over the border into the Gentile world, and begins its universal aspect. If we consider the magnitude of the change, and the difficulties of training and prejudice which had to be encountered in the Church itself, we shall not wonder at the abundance of supernatural occurrences which attended it. Without some such impulse, it is difficult to conceive of its having been accomplished.
In this narrative we see the supernatural preparation on both sides. God, as it were, lays His right hand on Cornelius and His left on Peter, and impels them towards each other. Philip had already preached to the Ethiopian, and probably the anonymous brethren in Act_11:20 had already spoken the word to pure Greeks at Antioch; but the importance of Peter's action here is that by reason of his Apostleship, his recognition of Gentile Christians becomes the act of the whole community. His entrance into the house of Cornelius ended the Jewish phase of the Church.
To Peter, as to every other Jew, it was quite a familiar idea that the Gentiles should come one day to worship God and believe in His Messiah; but it had never yet occurred to him, or to almost any other Jew, that this could happen unless by the Gentiles first becoming Jews. By training, Peter was a Jew of the intensely national school. In spite of their faith in Christ, he and the bulk of Palestine believers had remained, up to this point, Jews still. To such men the division which God had set up betwixt the two portions of mankind did not seem at that time a temporary party-wall (as St. Paul afterwards described it), intended to be taken down after it had served its purpose, in order that wider room might be made for both in one new temple. It was a fence of permanent and hopeless exclusion for all beyond, of permanent inclusion for all within. God had, as they believed, limited His grace for ever to the covenant of circumcision. All men who had not been brought near by that covenant and consecrated by its rites, were unclean and profane. It followed that the Church, or assembly of such as believed in Jesus Christ, could not be a wider communion than the followers of Moses, but a narrower. It formed a lesser fold inside the fold of Judaism. It was a more retired and safe shrine, to which you could only pass through the fore-court of the law. Any man might, it was felt, get into the fellowship of Jesus, and all men, it was hoped, would some day do so; still, to the great world of uncircumcised heathen sinners, access could lie only through that preliminary apparatus of cleansing which God had prepared in the Abrahamic covenant and the Mosaic ritual.1 [Note: J. O. Dykes, From Jerusalem to Antioch, 359.]
Did it ever strike you that Cornelius is our father? You never thought, perhaps, that you were so nearly related to him; but it is even so. He was a Gentile, and in him the Gentiles were formally admitted to the Church. He is the father of the Gentile branch of it. But we are Gentiles; and we, therefore, were, so to speak, “in the loins” of Cornelius when Peter received him. He is our Abraham. What Abraham was to the Jew, Cornelius is to us. The Jews gloried in the patriarch, looking up to their Abraham with love to his memory and reverence for his character. We have no reason to be ashamed of our father Cornelius. We may thank God for such a spiritual ancestor. When we think of him, however, we must do so with shame as well as exultation, for there is reason to fear that he, before his conversion and knowledge of Christ, was essentially and in fact a better Christian than some of us.2 [Note: T. Binney, St. Paul: His Life and Ministry, 126.]